MK Khenin Sponsoring New Bill to Protect Israel’s Marine Ecology

Knesset environmental lobby chair MK Dov Khenin (Hadash-Joint List), is sponsoring a new bill that seeks to protect Israel’s marine ecology. Adam Teva V’Din (Israel Union for Environmental Defense [IUED]) calls the proposed bill “the most significant and comprehensive environmental legislation” since the 2010 Clean Air Law, which was also sponsored by MK Khenin.

A demonstration near Tel-Aviv for a clean sea, May 2016

A demonstration near Tel-Aviv for a clean sea, May 2016 (Photo: Tzlalul)

A study prepared for the IUED environmental organization states that the damage caused by current practices in Israel’s territorial and economic waters amounts to at least NIS 731 million a year. The report was commissioned as part of the work of drafting the sea protection bill being readied for transfer to the Knesset Legal Bureau. The cost of the bill, which includes the establishment of a Sea Authority, is NIS 10.5 million a year, of which NIS 5 million is already being allocated for activities that will be transferred to the Authority.

 

IUED executive director Attorney Amit Bracha says, “This is a rare rallying of the coalition and opposition on behalf of Israel’s most important natural resource – the Mediterranean Sea. It is inconceivable that the state neglected its energy, commercial, communications, and tourist base for years.”

 

The preamble to the bill states, “Management of Israel’s marine natural resources has suffered from instability and lack of binding long-term planning… the instability, combined with multiple regulators and interested parties operating in this sphere, leads to chaos that is damaging the ecosystem, governmental and private parties operating in the area, and the public in general.”

 

The bill calls for the establishment of a new independent authority for managing the maritime region that will regulate the variety of uses for the marine environment and unite the authority currently dispersed among different agencies, which sometimes have contradictory interests. The authority will have five salaried positions with an annual cost of NIS 1.37 million out of a budget totaling NIS 10.5 million. NIS 5.9 million will be spent annually on monitoring the sea.

 

Under the proposed bill, the authority will be responsible for a general assessment of the marine environment, to be updated every five years. At the same time, the authority will prepare a national marine plan, to include general environmental preservation targets; environmental, social and economic considerations; various interests and their potential effect on the environment; and indices for assessing whether the plan is achieving its targets.

 

The authority will also establish and provide a budget for a national monitoring program, including the long-term gathering of scientific information that will provide an up-to-date and comprehensive picture of the state of the marine environment. It will establish a national marine information center incorporating all the information, which will be accessible to the public, and audit the quality of the information. A marine enforcement administration will be established and made responsible for prioritizing and coordinating between all the enforcement agencies relevant to marine enforcement.

 

IUED’s marine management head Attorney Tammy Ganot says that preservation of the ecosystem is important not only “in the classic sense of a variety of species and nature that are important in themselves, but also for our ability to make use of the ecosystem, the use of water for desalinization, for example. Water contaminated with oil cannot be used for desalinization, and 70% of the drinking water today is from desalinization. That means that the sea cannot be used for fishing [Ed. fishing boats being the source of oil spillage], which harms tourism, and requires taking into account of the enormous damage that can result from oil and gas exploration and drilling.

 

“The economic analysis does not include what happens if desalinization facilities are suddenly closed down for several days, and the damage to the economy,” Ganot says. “This is not included in the opinion, because there is no such information about the probability of a malfunction causing desalinization plants to close down.”

 

Such a shutdown took place last March at the Soreq desalinization facility, following contamination of seawater by treated wastewater. A serious case of pollution occurred last February, leading to the closure of the Palmachim beach to bathers and a recommendation not to visit the Soreq nature preserve.

 

“The Ministry of Health and the Israel Water Authority give approval for using water, and when there are high sewage values in the sea, they tell the desalinization plants to stop working. After this, the Water Authority fines the desalinization plant for not supplying the quantities of water they are obligated to supply. It’s not a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing; it’s a case of the right hand against the left hand,” Ganot says.